Combining the local and the universal has created great theatre in the past.As Dublin Theatre Festival showed, now it is time to rethink our place onthe stage, says Fintan O'Toole
Given its relatively small scale and perennially limited budget, what should audiences expect from Dublin Theatre Festival? A few decent nights out, of course. Some feeling of the pulse of Irish theatre. A chance to see that theatre in an international context and to calibrate its quality against some world-class productions. And maybe some pointers to the future. By all of these criteria this year's festival was a reasonable success.
It is probably true that the impact of the festival has gradually but inevitably diminished over the past 25 years. This has less to do with the festival than with the nature of Irish theatre. In the early 1980s, when Michael Colgan was taking over from the festival's founder, Brendan Smith, Irish audiences were used to work that was essentially literary, heavy on words and light on movement. It was a form that appealed to the ears but not to the eyes. In that context, exposure to the non-naturalistic, image-laden work of companies such as the Wroclaw Contemporary Theatre from Poland and Macunaima from Brazil could have an electrifying effect on audiences and practitioners.
As Irish theatre has become more sophisticated and visually literate, that possibility is more remote. If a jolt was delivered by this year's festival, it came much more from the intimations of mortality in Irish playwriting than with any of the foreign shows. The extraordinary generation that found its voice in the late 1950s and early 1960s was represented by three big productions: Druid's staging of Sharon's Grave by John B. Keane and new plays from Thomas Kilroy at the Abbey and Brian Friel at the Gate.
Hanging over all of them was an insistent warning that we can no longer assume that this generation will always be there, engaging with Irish society through the theatre.
Garry Hynes's marvellously strange production of Sharon's Grave reminded us not only that Keane is now sadly no longer with us but also that the world he drew on is dead too. If the past is always another country, the remote rural life of the play seems like another planet, and Hynes's staging exploited the fact that it has been liberated from realism and passed into the domain of the surreal. But even in doing so it drew attention to the impossibility of writing such a play now. The layers of myth, the pagan world view, that Keane uncovers no longer form part of the Irish cultural landscape.
In a different way, both Friel's Performances and Kilroy's The Shape Of Metal had decidedly valedictory tones. Neither had much relationship to Ireland now, or indeed to Ireland at all. The presences in Friel's play are Czech: the dead composer Janacek and the contemporary student writing a thesis on his last great work. Kilroy's sculptor is Anglo-Irish, but the very fact that she could be played so powerfully and confidently by the English actor Sara Kestelman underlines the incidental nature of her nationality. The setting could be any artist's studio anywhere.
And this lack of connection to Ireland is, in both cases, a function of the writer's introspective mood. Both Friel and Kilroy used other artists - the dead Janacek, the dying Nell Jeffrey - to explore the relationship of life to art. They asked the Yeatsian question of whether it is better to perfect the life or the work. And such a question largely assumes that the work of art is itself something detached from the messy business of life. That it should be asked with such insistence suggests a conscious turning away from the notion that a play could itself be an intervention in life, an engagement with the messy development of a society.
Yet the festival also reminded us that engagement of itself is no guarantee of lively theatre. Against Friel and Kilroy one might set a younger generation of playwrights that still has the energy to get stuck in. But the shows that represented that generation - the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Lieutenant Of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh and the Out of Joint/Royal Court co-production of Stella Feehily's Duck - both made one hanker after the artistry of the older generation.
The Lieutenant Of Inishmore is engaged in the sense that it is a deliberately grotesque satire on the culture of republican violence. The sadistic anti-hero Pádraic (played by Barry Ward) is deeply attached to his cat but routinely tortures, maims and murders people. This basic notion might well work as a darkly comic exaggeration of a reality that Ireland has lived through: the co-existence of humdrum normality and appalling cruelty. It is possible to imagine a fast, intimate, sure-footed production that could be both very funny and stingingly political. But the touring version that came to Dublin wasn't it. Wilson Milam's production was leaden, unevenly acted, utterly unsubtle and about as funny as the bubonic plague. Given her work on McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy, the evidence of what one of his plays can be like without her will probably have added even more to Garry Hynes's reputation than Sharon's Grave did.
Duck is engaged in a different sense: a young woman writing about two young women in Dublin now. It is a slice of the very different life of the city in contemporary circumstances. And in Max Stafford-Clark's masterly production it moves with great fluidity, confidence and energy, driven by a young cast in which Ruth Negga and Elaine Symons are impressive.
But it is also wafer-thin. The structure is episodic. The language is unambitious. The case for any kind of sustained interest in the solipsistic central character is weakly made. The play seems to mimic the weightlessness of contemporary Ireland without having much to say about it.
Which raises the question of where Irish theatre can go. Does it have to choose between a kind of generalised European cosmopolitanism on one side and a simple reflection of the prevailing shallowness of Irish culture on the other?
The festival certainly suggested that a kind of international theatre marketplace is emerging. We had a Catalan, Calixto Bieito, directing an English company in Hamlet, with the lead role played by a Scot, the design done by two Germans and a Swiss dramaturg working on the text.
The result, a vivid if brutal presentation of the play's action with little place for politics or poetry, suggested both the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of cosmopolitanism. The common denominator - the story - wins out at the expense of the cultural specificities of language and the political specificities of time and place.
Irish theatre needs to be open to these possibilities, of course, and the festival proved that it is. The lead roles in the two big Irish productions at the Abbey and the Gate were played by an English actor and a Romanian. The only Irish playwriting debut, Feehily's Duck, was brought to us by an English company, as was The Lieutenant Of Inishmore. The borders of Irish theatre are already highly permeable. But this isn't quite the same thing as creating that fusion of the local and the universal that made the best of 20th-century Irish theatre so potent.
One way of creating that fusion, of course, is to go back to the common body of European myth that has been handed down from the Greeks. But while those texts remain extraordinarily eloquent, the limits of their adaptability to contemporary situations were obvious in Mythos, the often admirable Israeli adaptation of the Oresteia and other plays from the ITIM Theatre Ensemble.
As a retelling of the fall of the house of Atreus, Rina Yerushalmi's version has great strengths: a steely dignity, a brilliant use of simple materials in the ever-shifting design, some charismatic acting and an ensemble with splendid vocal artistry.
But the attempt to make the story contemporary, so that it can say something about the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, alsoleads to some rather vapid attempts at expressive movement and a replacement of the Greek gods with some airy clichés about Earth and the universe. As a result the well-intentioned political metaphors remained ineffectual.
But there were also more promising pointers to the future. Robert Lepage's The Far Side Of The Moon, performed by the magnificent Yves Jacques, used the same metaphor of humanity in the vastness of space as Mythos did. But by interweaving a funny, poignant story of two warring Quebecois brothers with the space race, Lepage has created a perfect fusion of the universal and the particular. Funny, bittersweet, often astonishingly beautiful, the show also has much to say about the Cold War, history and the yearnings and follies of humanity.
Intriguingly, the nearest Irish equivalent to this kind of achievement came not from the mainstream but from Fabulous Beast Dance Company's exploration of the legend of Giselle. Michael Keegan-Dolan's version, set in small-town Ireland but performed by a company from Nigeria, the UK, the US, Slovakia, Austria and Italy, was both a direct address to an Ireland that would not have been out of place in the early work of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and an international event. It had a strong sense of drama and conflict but also an immense visual and physical presence. Even if the elements didn't always cohere, there was an unmistakable sense that something exciting is cooking in this particular cauldron and that it just might feed the emergence of a theatre adequate to the strange place that Ireland now is.
